This week’s guilty verdict in the Bill Cosby sexual assault trial was many years in the making and decades overdue. You could say the same for the lessons that were learned and the victories that were won on this long, winding and detour-filled road to justice.

You could also say that the battle against sexual predators is just getting started. Fortunately, society is better armed than we’ve been in a long time, and we have a fierce group of women to thank for that.

When Cosby was found guilty Thursday of drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in Pennsylvania 14 years ago, the jury deliberated for less than two days. This was quite a change from Cosby’s 2017 trial on the same charges, when the jury deliberated for six days and ended up being deadlocked.

After last year’s trial, Cosby was seen performing in a Philadelphia jazz club just a few months later. Now, the man we used to call “America’s Dad” faces up to 30 years in prison.

The #MeToo movement — in which women and men began speaking out against powerful men who have harassed and/or assaulted them — is less than one year old. But you would be hard pressed to find a better gauge of its impact than the story of Bill Cosby and a history of assault accusations that stretches back for decades.

And you couldn’t find a stronger, more tenacious team of warriors than the women who came together to put this Hollywood predator behind bars. Against legal and societal odds, these women kept Cosby’s case alive and viable long enough to deliver it into the exact enlightened moment where justice was most likely to be done.

The list starts with Andrea Constand, the former Temple University basketball official who considered Cosby a friend and mentor before he drugged and raped her. The details of the assault — the friendship Cosby nurtured beforehand, the drugs he pushed on her during her visit to his home, his insistence that the sex they had was consensual — echoed stories told by many other women stretching back many years.

Most of those cases were long past the statutes of limitations in the various states where they happened. Constand’s was not. After winning a $3.38 million settlement against him in a 2005 civil case, Constand agreed to meet him in criminal court. After the 2017 jury was deadlocked, she returned to court again. She knew she would once again be portrayed as a schemer and an opportunist, but she did it anyway.

Another noteworthy difference about this year’s trial was the testimony of five additional accusers, as opposed to the one additional woman who testified along with Constand in the 2017 trial. The same thing happened during the 2005 civil trial, when Constand’s testimony of being drugged and assaulted was bolstered by the accounts of a dozen women who came forward with similar stories.

In addition to Andrea and her army, let us salute Constand’s mother, Gianna, who called Cosby after her daughter finally told her about her experience and confronted him about his behavior. Credit is also due to Associated Press reporter Maryclaire Dale, who spent a decade petitioning the judge overseeing Constand’s 2005 case to unseal the documents.

There are Constand’s lawyers, Bebe H. Kivitz and Dolores Troiani. There is legal dynamo Gloria Allred, who represents 33 of the 60-plus women who are accusing Cosby of sexual assault.

And there is Barbara Bowman, who galvanized other victims when she wrote a blistering column on the Washington Post website about the groundswell of attention that resulted from comedian Hannibal Buress calling Cosby a rapist in his stand-up act. Why did it take a joke from a man to get accusations against Cosby on the public radar, Bowman wondered, when she had been trying tell her story about being drugged and assaulted by Cosby for more than a decade?

Thanks to the many victims who spoke up, the Cosby case put the #MeToo lessons into action. It reminded us that there is enormous strength in numbers, even when the man you are taking on is beloved and powerful. Thanks to Kivitz, Troiani, Allred and Dale, we know how important it is for women to be in positions of power and influence. Thanks to comedian Buress, we know how vital it is that men speak up, too.

And thanks to our #MeToo awakening, our collective conscience has been raised to the point where we are getting a much clearer view of the truth. So when the Cosby warriors came asking for justice, the people delivered.